by Lisa Unger
I nodded. Normally, I would have felt desperate and worried about him, wondering if he would stay or go back to the streets. But part of me had let Ace go. Not that I didn’t love him as much, or that I didn’t want him to be well. But I’d finally gotten the clue that no matter what I did I couldn’t control him. All this time, that’s what I’d been trying to do. Hoping if I just loved him enough, helped him enough, he’d learn to love himself, help himself. Maybe it was the little bit of concrete to the skull; it knocked some sense into me.
My father sighed. “I think he felt we favored you, Ridley. Me and Max. But it was never that, you know. There was always enough love for both of you. Enough of everything.”
He’d said the same thing to me in his office. It was like a mantra he was repeating to comfort himself. “You were always just easy, Ridley. Easy to please, easy to love.” He didn’t say “easier,” but I heard it in his tone.
“Let’s not get into this,” my mother said to him. Yes, let’s not get into who was whose favorite and how that’s communicated in all sorts of nonverbal ways, I thought but didn’t say. I threw my mother a look and she looked away.
My father was sitting beside me on the bed with his hand on my arm. I looked at him and I saw shame on his face. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly that he regretted; it seemed as though there was a lot to choose from. I didn’t have a chance to ask. The door opened softly and Jake walked in. I was washed with relief at seeing him. He paused in the doorway, seeing me with my father. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “These are my parents, Ben and Grace.” My mother rose, clutched her purse to her side, and started moving toward me.
“We’ve met,” Jake said. “We had a long talk.”
I looked over at my father and he nodded. My mother made some kind of small sound to communicate her disapproval. She came over and kissed me on the head.
“Get some rest, dear. This will all seem less awful in the morning.”
Just like that. I could tell by the way she’d squared her shoulders and held her head high that she believed it. That she would make it so. I envied her. I knew nothing was going to seem less awful in the morning. That the road ahead of us was dangerous and uncharted. And that there were miles and miles to cross.
My father rose and kissed my head. “I love you, little girl. I’m sorry for all of this.” That apology sounded so simple, as if it was all just some silly misunderstanding that we’d all soon laugh about.
“I love you, too, Dad,” I said, more from reflex than anything. I did love him, of course. He was right about one thing, I couldn’t be any more his daughter, biology or not. He left quietly, picking up his coat from the chair and moving past Jake with a cool nod. He seemed old and stooped, as if the heavy burden he’d carried all these years was finally weighing him down.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, looking back at me from the door. “We’ll talk everything out, Ridley. It’ll all be okay.”
“Okay,” I said. But I wasn’t sure about what tomorrow held anymore. I could tell he didn’t want to go, didn’t want to leave me with the truth and not be around to spin and control it. He cast a long gaze at Jake, the truth-sayer, and I could see anger on his face. I think he felt unseated by Jake, as if Jake had taken a place in my life that he’d never expected anyone to fill, the place I looked to for the truth. No parent ever wants to give that place up in their child’s eyes, but they all have to sooner or later, don’t they? He left then and that’s when the tears came again. (Who knew I had so many?)
Jake pulled the chair beside my bed closer and took my hand, let me cry, comforted me only by touch, spared me all the platitudes.
“Are you okay?” I asked Jake when I’d finally pulled myself together.
“I’m okay. I feel like a shit for not catching you when you fell.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
He shrugged and squeezed my hand. “I know. I don’t know what I’m feeling right now. There’s too much to work through. It’s going to take time.”
I tried for an empathetic smile but it made my head hurt. I told him all the things my parents had revealed.
“I’m so sorry for all of this, Ridley—all the lies, all the mess,” he said when I was done.
Like Jake, I still had to sort through what had happened to me. I definitely didn’t know what the future held. And my life as I knew it had literally been shattered. But I was still there, still me. And there was something comforting about that. There’s something comforting about knowing that when all the things that you think define you fall away, you’re still standing.
“I’m not sorry,” I said.
He looked at me, confused.
“On the bridge,” I said, putting my hand to his beautiful face. “You asked me if I was sorry I met you. I never answered you. Well, I’m not.”
He smiled, leaned in, and kissed me on the lips, so softly, so gently, sending off starbursts of pain behind my eyes. He whispered in my ear, “I love you, Ridley Jones…or whatever your name is.”
We laughed then because as sad and awful as the truth was, Alexander Harriman had been right. We were alive and healthy and we had each other. Like he said, that was more than a lot of people had.
thirty-two
I don’t believe in mistakes. Never have. I believe that there are a multitude of paths before us and it’s just a matter of which way we walk home. I don’t believe in regret. If you regret things about your life, then I’ll bet that you’re not paying attention. Regret is just imagining that you know what would have happened if you took that job in California or married your high-school sweetheart or just looked one more time before you stepped out into the street…or didn’t. But you don’t know; you can’t possibly know. I could have spent a lot of time thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t seen Justin Wheeler toddling into the street that day. And I did spend a little time thinking about that—but not much. You could drive yourself crazy thinking that way.
They were eager to get rid of me at Mount Sinai Hospital. I had only a “catastrophic” health insurance policy (private insurance is expensive and I never get sick) and there was some debate over whether hitting your head on a sidewalk after passing out from what amounts to a panic attack was exactly catastrophic. There was some debate over the meaning of the word and whether it was the incident or the result of the incident that had to be life threatening in order to be covered. Since the less than twenty-four hours I had spent in the hospital was already costing me over two thousand dollars, I figured I could recover more cheaply somewhere else. Jake had gone downstairs to hail a cab and I was washing my face, looking pale and funny in the mirror with a bandage on my head, when Detective Salvo walked in.
“They spring you?” he asked.
“Yeah, they’re sick of me already.”
He smiled and sat on the vinyl chair by the door. He looked tired. I noticed he was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing the day before.
“The charges against Harley Jacobsen have been dropped,” he said as I sat back down on the bed. He told me about the signatures on his gun registrations and how they hadn’t matched the rifle registration. That and the fact that there hadn’t been any fingerprints on the gun meant that there was no legal basis for charging him.
“That’s good news.”
“For you and Mr. Jacobsen. For me, I’ve still got a murder to solve and no leads.”
We sat in silence. I could have suggested that he start investigating Alex Harriman’s client roster, but I wasn’t going to do that. I couldn’t do that.
“Something interesting, though,” he said, looking at me. “Some of the shell casings found at the scene of the diner shooting match a gun used in another crime, a shooting up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx last week. Guess who the prime suspect is.”
I shrugged.
“A thug named Angelo Numbruzio, a known associate of Paulie ‘The Fist’ Umbruglia. Does that name ring a bell?”
“I guess it does. I’ve heard about him on the news.”
“His lawyer is Alexander Harriman.”
I looked at him. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
“I thought it was information you might like to have. I mean, somebody who was looking to draw connections between things might find it interesting.”
Jake appeared in the door then and the look on his face told me that he found it interesting. I felt my stomach do a little flip. Was he still looking for justice, for answers?
“I’ve made all the connections I need to make,” I said. “Is there anything else, Detective?”
He stood up as I made my way toward the door and followed me into the hallway. “If there is, I’ll give you a call. I have your number.”
“I’m getting rid of that cell phone.”
He laughed then and I smiled back at him. He was a good man but I knew he wasn’t going to let this thing go. And I couldn’t afford his questions, not with Alexander Harriman’s threats still echoing in my battered head.
Are you disappointed in me? Did you expect me to begin a crusade to find all the Project Rescue babies in the world and reunite them with their possibly abusive parents? Ask yourself, if you’d lost everything, if you were barely clinging to the shreds of what was left of your life, if the lives of the only family you had ever known had been threatened by a lawyer who represented people with names like Paulie “The Fist,” what would you do? Really. What would you do?
In the cab on the way downtown, I leaned against Jake. I wasn’t wearing any shoes because somehow my Nikes had gotten lost between my arrival at the hospital and my departure. So I’d left the hospital in stocking feet.
I watched a sunlit Central Park roll by. The trees were losing their leaves; people were jogging, Rollerblading, walking dogs. Such a normal day for everyone else.
“There’s no proof of any of it, you know that?” he said, as if thinking aloud. “They were so careful. There’s no proof that any of it ever happened.”
“Except that those kids are missing. Except that you’re Charlie and I’m Jessie.”
“Yeah, but there are kids missing all over the country and all over the world. Unsolved cases like Charlie, Jessie, Brian, and Pamela. We could never trace it back to Project Rescue.”
It was true. They’d left no evidence. They’d managed somehow to change the Social Security numbers and birth certificates of the children, to give them new identities altogether. The children, they were…ghosts. Maybe they were better off, maybe not.
“Unless…” said Jake, looking past me out the window.
“Unless what?”
“Unless we could get someone to talk.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking at me. “We don’t have to think about it now. Let’s just get you home.”
“Jake, my family—”
“I know, Ridley. Don’t worry. Forget I said anything.”
I didn’t respond. I was still feeling pretty groggy and all I wanted to do was lie down. But I had this uneasy feeling in my shoulders, and that noise I hear when I’m stressed, the blood rushing in my right ear. And I knew it wasn’t over.
thirty-three
We had dinner with injustice sitting between us. It drank a glass of wine and ate heartily while we pushed pasta around our plates and picked at salad. We had been crushed by fear and it sat with us fat and victorious, untouchable.
We barely talked through the meal. As Jake cleared the plates I sat on the couch and looked out onto First Avenue, thought about where I would move. I couldn’t even stand to go into my apartment. Jake had promised to go down for me and retrieve some clean clothes, shoes, and toiletries after we’d finished eating. I turned the television on and pressed the mute button and zoned out on the silent images flashing on the screen.
After a while, Jake came to the futon and sat beside me. I leaned into him and we sat in silence for a while, listening to the street noise outside. There was so much hanging between us that the silence was not comfortable. I could hear the wheels in his mind turning and I’m sure he could hear mine.
“Can you walk away from this?” I asked him finally. “Can you settle for what we know and move on from here?”
He was quiet for a minute. “Can you?”
“I think I have to,” I said, even as uncertainty tugged at me. “You said it yourself. There’s no proof. No trail to follow.”
“Unless we can get someone to talk; someone to admit what happened. Unless we can get someone to take responsibility for Project Rescue.”
“Like who?”
“I’ve been thinking. Your father is adamant that he had no knowledge of the other side of Project Rescue. But someone was flagging those kids. Someone who worked with him, maybe?”
I turned to look at him. He had his eyes down as if he didn’t want to see the expression on my face.
“Hasn’t your ex’s mother worked with your father for years?”
“Esme?”
“I saw her name on every one of those files.”
I thought of Esme, that night in Zack’s apartment, the conversation we’d had about Max. I’d have done anything for that man, she’d said. What had she done?
“Maybe, Ridley, maybe she’d talk to us. Maybe because of her love for you, she’d tell us what she knows about Project Rescue.”
I remembered how she acted at Zack’s. Not like a woman prepared to talk about the past, that’s for sure.
“You want to risk all our lives for this, Jake?” I asked.
He shook his head but kept his eyes on the floor. “You have a life, Ridley,” he said softly. “I don’t.”
I felt inexplicably hurt at that statement. I guess part of me thought we had a life together, a possible future, and that would have been enough for me to move forward and leave all of this behind. But I guess the difference was I knew the answers to my questions. I knew what happened to Jessie and Teresa Stone. I knew what happened to Christian Luna. I knew who I was then and who I had become. Jake was still an orphan, still quidam. His place with me was not enough.
I saw the choice I had to make. If I chose Jake, I had to choose the truth no matter how painful, no matter how ugly, no matter the risk involved. If I chose to keep silent and protect my family, I chose the beautiful, familiar lie, where everything was a false front. I would have to choose a place where my past would, over the years, become like the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot, a creature that someone claimed to have seen once, but one in which no one quite believed.
You don’t have much faith in me, I’m sure. I haven’t exactly made the noblest choices up to now. It’s been Jake pushing me along the path, coaxing me to ask the questions that led us here. I felt his eyes on me then, and when I met them, I knew. We had already allied ourselves in this world. The day I stood here and held his hand, we began our trek to the edge of my reality. And at the precipice, there was nothing to do but jump.
“She was there that night, at Zack’s. She knows what happened, I think. She told me that I was dredging up things that wouldn’t be good for anyone.”
Jake leaned forward. “How much do you think she knows?”
“I really don’t know. She didn’t say much. But she was clearly in the loop. I think Zack knows something, too. She stopped him from telling me everything he knew about Project Rescue.”
“If she was the one doing the flagging, she’d at least know who she flagged for Project Rescue,” said Jake. “And she might know how Max found out about you.”
“You mean she might know if Max was responsible for Teresa Stone’s murder.”
Jake was looking at me intently. Then suddenly he got up quickly and moved past me. I realized then that he hadn’t been looking at me but at the television that was on behind me.
“Notorious mob attorney Alexander Harriman and an unidentified associate were found murdered execution style in his Central Park West office today,” said the grim-f
aced newscaster when Jake turned up the volume. In the background, I could see the entrance to Harriman’s brownstone office, where we’d just been twenty-four hours earlier. Someone was being rolled out on a stretcher, in a body bag. “So far the police have no information on any suspects.”
“Mr. Harriman had no shortage of enemies,” said a homicide detective at the scene to the reporter. “We have our work cut out for us.”
Jake turned to look at me. His face was a mirror of my own heart, stunned, afraid.
“Our deal was with Harriman,” I said slowly.
“I have a bad feeling the deal is off.”
We wouldn’t have gone back to my apartment at all except for the small problem of my not having any shoes, remember. I’d gone from the hospital to the cab to our building in socks and couldn’t stand to enter my apartment on my way up to Jake’s. So I changed into a clean pair of Jake’s socks at his place and left it at that. I was regretting it as Jake pulled on his jacket and handed me mine.
“We are most definitely not safe here. We have to go.”
“Where?”
“Someplace we’ve never been before.”
I looked down at my feet.
“Shit,” he said, moving toward the door. “Okay. Wait here.”
“No way. We go together or we leave like this.”
He sighed and disappeared into his bedroom. He came back with the gun I’d seen before. He shoved it in his waistband and zipped his jacket up over it.
“Okay, let’s go.”
We moved quickly and quietly down the stairs and onto the landing that led to my apartment. At the door, Jake motioned for me to be quiet as I handed him my keys.
“Ridley!” A sharp whisper startled us both. I turned and saw Victoria’s one eye peering out from the darkness of her apartment. I put my finger to my lips and moved toward her. I couldn’t help but think, She does know my name!
“Victoria, it’s not safe. Go back to your apartment and close the door.”
She huddled in the crack, staring at me with fear. Her wig was forgotten and a few gray strands on her bald head were caught by a breeze and stood nearly on end.
